MSM - Whipping Up Frenzy

Mark Steyn writes: (ht: Jill Fallon)

At some point we will come to see that the developed world’s massive expansion of personal sexual liberty has provided a useful cover for the shrivelling of almost every other kind. Free speech, property rights, economic liberty and the right to self-defence are under continuous assault by Big Government. But who cares when Big Government lets you shag anything that moves and every city in North America hosts a grand parade to celebrate your right to do so? It’s an oddly reductive notion of individual liberty. The noisier grow the novelties of our ever more banal individualism, the more the overall societal aesthetic seems drearily homogenized—like closing time in a karaoke bar with the last sad drunks bellowing off the prompter “I did it My Way!”

And in the end even the sex doesn’t do it. In the Netherlands, the most progressive nation in Europe, the land where whatever’s your bag is cool, where naked women beckon from storefront windows, a certain ennui is palpable. Last week, the ANP news agency released a poll showing that the Dutch now derive more pleasure from going to the bathroom than from sex. It wasn’t a close-run thing: eighty per cent identified a trip to the toilet as the activity “they enjoy the most”—or, as the South African newspaper the Witness put it, “The Bog’s Better Than Bonking.” To modify Eliot, this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a flush..More>>

What will precipitate legislation to protect "heteronormativity" in the concupiescent West? You recall it, don't you? You know, that whole "male and female He created them" thing that populated the planet so successfully for soo long, before sperm donors, surrogate mothers, and fertility doctors with petri dishes? Will we live to see the day of sanity in place of 'I am defined by whatever I want to excite my genitalia with, AND I get to put it to those dastardly "breeders" and monogamists?'

Personally, gentle reader, I would happily hear as of a far away shipwreck news of Hollywood's demise, the mainstream media's atrophy, and all liberal rags like the WaPo and NYT being swallowed up by the earth.

Chesterton said it long ago: news is the bizarre. It's what sells advertising. The demise of the spreading of the strange and aberrant would not hurt my feelings at all. Then, the true, good, and beautiful might have a chance once again.

Pity the Child

Better living through alchemical Gnosticism. WE know what is best: anything but Normal.

Pity THIS Child

Department of Alchemical Gnosticism -- read "Trains that despise the Natural Law and relish the freedom of getting off the rails and into deep sandy morass": [h/t: New Oxford Review]

Transsexual man is pregnant with baby girl -
Resorted to home insemination with donor's sperm.

The Parade Passes, the Dogs Bark - Pt. 2

The Chartreuse Moose squad and Al Became Sal better-living-through-veering-off-the-Natural-Law crew plan protests for the Holy Father’s visit to America. They must feel so fulfilled. Girard notes:

“It is the effort to leave the ‘beaten path’ which forces everyone inevitably into the same ditch.” [image: Michelle Malkin]

UPDATE: The Rt Rev Joseph Devine, Bishop of Motherwell: ‘We neglect the gay movement at our peril.’

Better Alchemical Gnosticism Thru Surgery

Al seeking to become more Sal-like, sues Catholic hospital for denying him a breast-augmentation procedure. [h/t: Mark Shea]

Meanwhile, Paul McHugh, University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, relates the problems such persons deal with in "Surgical Sex" at First Things.

Disordered passions want to deny the impeccable design of the Creator. Hubris desires to do modifications, alterations, and fabrications to the very beginning places of Natural Law and God-given paths in natural revelation and salvation. It is as though the train doesn't want to be hindered with railroad tracks anymore. They crimp his freedom and self-actualization. He wants to be free to go off the rails and do things his way. Ultimately, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, it is Thy way or my way.

The dude wants big chest bumpers. Why? To nurse a child? Probably not.

We Don't Need No Stinking Natural Law

Gerard of The Cafeteria is Closed explores the weird litigious world of the crisis of sexual distinctions and hubris-filled alchemical Gnosticism in The "narrative of the transgendered."

Alchemical Gnosticism - 2

An area explored early at this blog, Thomas Storck writes at the New Oxford Review, "Hating the Body - Body Piercing, Blood Rites, and Transsexualism." He outlines the nexus of what Girard calls the "crisis of distinctions" at the individual and interdividual levels of gender differentiation.

Those who hate the fact that mankind is divided into two sexes, with a corresponding range of behaviors rooted in this natural fact, try to destroy the idea that any sex-related behavior is natural. They say instead that the behavior that seems to flow from maleness or femaleness is in fact a societal "construct." Some would admit the reality of the two biological sexes, but after that all is in flux. Thus, one physically female person can describe herself as a "masculine, lesbian, female-to-male cross-dresser and transgenderist" (in Feinberg, Trans Liberation). Basing their theories on the margins of human behavior, they then make such margins normative. It is as if they were to assert that since some humans think they are dogs, the canine personality is as natural to us as the human. Having first rejected the notion of any natural norms, they logically go the next step and throw out statistical norms. All that remains is flux.

It might seem that the mutilation of the body, and indeed of the human personality, engaged in by transsexuals is the summit of the hatred of the human that I speak of here. But it is not. For the ultimate project of many transsexuals, and others as well, is to proclaim the utter irrelevance of the body, or at least of its sexual aspects. For they assert that there are not just two sexes; and there are not just the six or seven sexes (or genders) that some revisionists have advocated (hermaphrodite, male homosexual, lesbian, transsexual, etc.). Instead there is just human sexuality, a continuum on which "male" and "female" are only two points on a line that extends indefinitely. The book of Genesis declares, "Male and female He created them." But the new teaching seeks to replace that by declaring, in effect, "Sexuality is." For instead of a defined process and activity, created for definite natural ends which are inherent in the process, this view simply asserts that any kind of genital activity engaged in by anyone with anything and in any way fulfills the meaning of sexuality. We have progressed to the point, so these would say, where we must overthrow not just God but also nature. Reality itself is now our oppressor.

One can see the dynamic of this in homosexuality. Homosexuals argue that since they are attracted to persons of the same sex, therefore for them this is proper sexuality, even natural sexuality. Of course this is absurd, as the logic and structure of their bodies proclaim. But still homosexuals at least seem to keep the notion of two sexes, just that some members of each sex are inclined toward same-sex relationships. But this is illusory. For in fact, as soon as we escape from the rule of the body's own logic, from the conduct indicated by the very shape and function of the body and its parts, then we are in a fantasy land where anything can be, anything that the mind can imagine and the will can desire. We end up with a world in which we have "those who blur or bridge the boundary of gender expression they were assigned at birth: cross-dressers, transsexuals, intersex people," and so on. Sexuality simply is, and sex simply happens.

This deconstruction of sexuality is manifested, for example, in the career of one who is known as Kate Bornstein:

Kate Bornstein is neither a man nor a woman but "hir" own special transgressive creation - and, inevitably, something of a traveling circus. "Ze" was born male, raised as a boy, opted for a sex-change in adulthood, and became a woman. A few years later, she got tired of being a woman so she stopped - but didn't want to become a man again (The Independent [London], March 8, 1998).

Supporters of this way of life believe that once we recognize that transsexuality is not a "gender illness" which can be cured by surgery, then we will realize that "transsexuality may be more destabilizing than homosexuality." For then even "biological sex is revealed to have no inevitable natural meaning, but only the social meaning attached to it on the basis of gender identity" (Harvard Law Review, June 1995). There is no nature; again, sexuality simply is.

Today we are confronted culturally by a badly confused attempt to destroy Cartesian culture which itself engages in the extremes of Cartesian behavior, and by those who deny the obvious fact that human sexual activity and sexual organs have a natural purpose or finality.

Only if we return to God, in fact to Jesus Christ, who is God incarnate, the Redeemer of both bodies and souls, do we have any hope of returning either to nature or to cultural sanity. Though the modern world shows little interest in such a return, we Christians must continually point out that the world has strayed from God and from nature. We must point to Jesus Christ as the only remedy. For without such a return we cannot expect much future for the human race. Read all …

Storck clearly presupposes Natural Law as per the understanding of the Catholic Church in this essay. Refer to David P. Lang's absolutely essential Why Matter Matters [OSV 2002] for deeper explorations into the Church's anti-gnostic truth.

The Hubris of Alchemical Gnosticism

Or, How I Learned to Love Dionysus
Pity two people: the 64-year old retiree who followed his disordered passions to become a "woman" surgically, and the writer of this story, "Woman Suing IRS Over Sex-Change Tax Claims":

After years of painful soul searching, Rhiannon O'Donnabhain -- a former construction engineer from a devout Irish Catholic family in Boston -- decided to surgically change his sex to female in 2001. The struggle was equally tough financially -- hormone treatments and medical procedures set her back $25,000, a burden she felt could be partially offset by taking a $5,000 tax deduction for medical costs.

Talk about alchemical Gnosticism at its finest pagan expression. It's all here: years of succombing to the vertigo of the disordered imagination, better living through chemicals "treatments", elective neutering. All at the small cost in monetary terms of $25,000. Did I mention the hubris of re-designing what God the Creator had already given this Rhiannon O'Donnabhain in terms of a teleological purpose for being in the universe with his precious, unique, and vital person, made imago dei?

But no. He decided to "become a woman," and the benighted IRS disagrees with the decision and action being a tax claim. And what does the scientific community say about this?

"When did the IRS suddenly become physicians?" said Marshall Forstein, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "It's absolutely clear that transgender identity is a condition discussed in diagnostic manuals. It seems the IRS is now in the business of practicing medicine without a license."

And, according to O'Donnabhain's lawyers from the Massachusetts-based Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD), the case is expected to set a precedent on whether such procedures will be considered tax deductible.

So since GLAD is now on-top of the situation, we know that the human Gnostic project with its emphasis on power of individual choice of lifestyle over God's silly designs so regrettably put into each person without consulting us about our choice in the matter -- for heaven's sake, what kind of a life-giving Creator is this anyway? Gees! -- the tax claim will set a precedent and go through with flying colors. Hooray, human hubris wins!

Sarcasm aside: Catholic truth is in a two-front war. Ostensibly, the human hubris crowd thinks in self-satisfaction that they are pleasing themselves. In reality, they are bowing at the altar of Dionysus. On the other hand, the Scimitar is the other side of the same coin: paganism cloaked in pharisaical Koran-rules that catch new victims for sacrifice. To whom? Same god: Dionysus. Fancy that.

Continue to pray for the Holy Father, the Church, and all who hold antinomy toward this basion of sacramental grace and truth. +

Must Read List: Why Matter Matters by David Lang